New Poverty

When Mother needs a few objects for the church Bazaar she goes to Liberty's, leaving Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane (with the Lamb to be kept happy and entertained) on their good behaviour; but with adults in the house as well. The burned nursery carpet is replaced with a persian rug from the secondhand shop in nearby Camden High Street. The children display an education that covers literature, grammar, geometry, history, geography, and considerable social skills.

So how much a year is there here, in this English middle class family living respectably but prudently on Father's work? £100,000 would not be enough, £150,000 would be on the low side.

Today the reckoning so often predicted by economic doomsayers has arrived, not with the cataclysmic instancy predicted but with a slow, irreversible loss of lifestyle for millions.

While the middle class was never millions' strong, it punched above its weight spectacularly, proffering a civilized, interesting, enjoyable way of life without offending sensibility on exclusion - social or economic. Aspiration and determination led to inclusion, and the compexity of its cultural endowment (whatever culture it might be, for middle classness is found in all our cultures) could be passed through the generations even when misfortune or incompetence led to economic poverty.

Centuries of writing centre on the social consensus to support this ideal; Fanny Price may live in a Portsmouth slum with a pig of a father but she, and her siblings, are gathered back ( motivated naturally, at first, by family self interest). Leonard Bast may end up dead, (and today Charles Wilcox is released), but he got far enough to be killed. Pick your own novel, but no-one is denied the chance to try or denied the support to stay.

Until now. In the last ten years there has been the most vicious attack upon the most characteristic, the defining, notion of our open society. And, in the name of 'equality', 'the ending of poverty', 'social integration' we are to be confined to our own sphere, controlled by the withdrawal of economic independence, education, intergenerational ties, family connexion, personal privacy, and freedom of movement.

Punitive taxation, gift prohibition, inheritance denial, means testing, social imprinting rather than the acquisition of culture and learning, the atomisation of kinship groups, and grotesque invasions of personal privacy by 'health' and 'social' services compulsorily funded by us all, reign; and as all faces are forced to turn towards the State and away from one another, isolation is consoled by pornography and licence.


We cannot think of the damage only to ourselves. Think of what we can give our children, and how little it is when we think of what our parents and theirs, gave to us.